SL9 · Chiltern Main Line · Gerrards Cross
Gerrards Cross data recovery. A town the railway made in 1906, worked now from rooms over the garage.
Before the railway was built, Gerrards Cross barely existed. At that time this was heathland (known as Chalfont Heath) and only had a church which was built on Oxford Road in 1859. There was virtually no other development in the area prior to 1906, when the station opened on the joint line of both the Great Western Railway and the Great Central Railway, and subsequently the population grew from 552 in 1901 to 1,612 ten years later. The 2021 census reported a total of 8,554 people living within the civil parish. Currently three trains per hour travel to London's Marylebone station, two trains per hour go to Oxford and one train per hour goes to High Wycombe. In addition approximately 1.10 million entries and exits were recorded at Gerrards Cross station during 2024/25. However, while many of these daily trips are made through Gerrards Cross, most of the actual work is done inside. For example, there are solicitors, patent attorneys, accountants, mortgage advisors and consultants, each practising alone or with one associate in a small office above a garage, with an entire client history held in a mail archive on a laptop and one external hard drive next to it. These records need to be retained for long periods of time. Much of the equipment used to hold these records consists of common consumer items, and much of this equipment is encrypted, with no duplicate available anywhere if anything should happen to the original file. When one stops, there is no counter in Gerrards Cross, and most cases come via postal service: you obtain a quote first, either over the telephone or using the form, then post the drive to the Guildford intake laboratory tracked and insured. Alternatively you may drop it off at the Guildford intake laboratory yourself (Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointments necessary). Diagnosis at Guildford is free.
Describe the fault to an engineer
0800 6890668
What comes off a Gerrards Cross desk.
None of these? Run the triage →| The symptom | Why it turns up here | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| A solicitor's laptop can't pass the password prompt on start-up | Two different items; backing up is not the same as encrypting. This confusion exists in every area but particularly here. | First obtain a quote and then send its disk (not the machine) and send the recovery keys with the disk |
| The external disk situated next to a one-room practice | Twenty years of client information and this was the only backup anybody made | When you hear anything other than normal from your back-up device, stop using it |
| An estate agent's NAS located behind an office at Packhorse Road | Twenty years' worth of photographs and floor plans of properties, spread over four bays and never inspected | Take an image of this while it reads |
| Compliance PC that won't move beyond the boot screen | Advisers' data needs to be kept for many years and nobody advised the hard disk | Place your repair tools back; a failing disk is worth one good read |
| A camera memory card that is being recognised by the system as empty | Cards will give no indication, and using an undelete tool makes an already very small possibility even smaller | Remove it; leave it be; obtain a quote; then post it exactly as it came |
What a Gerrards Cross case actually looks like.
Four things SL9 asks before posting.
Everything of ours is encrypted. Does that rule a recovery out?
No. While we do work with BitLocker, FileVault and hardware encrypted media just like normal work (as long as the password, recovery key or PIN comes with the drive), encryption has always been treated as a method of protecting data rather than creating a secondary backup, as many SL9 practices will find out when a disk fails. Without the decryption key, we can't read it either. Storage soldered to the board (such as T2 and Apple silicon-based Macs, or soldered laptop flash) is not taken on. If you are unsure whether your device contains removable storage, please call us before sending anything in.
How fast does an SL9 job turn round?
First get a quote from us; then send a tracked parcel (with tracking number) via post on a weekday, and it usually arrives at an engineer's bench the next day, with a written figure not far behind. Once you agree to this figure, a logical fault will typically be fixed within two business days. Mechanical repairs, or repairing multiple disks, take longer, but you will know which one applies before we start the process.
Do you cover Chalfont St Peter, since it shares the postcode?
Yes, and regardless of what SL9 implies, the two are separate places. Chalfont St Peter, Beaconsfield, Denham and Amersham each have their own page on this site. A postcode does not affect the manner in which parcels are transported or the cost of the service provided.
Could we drop a drive in rather than post it?
There is no counter at Gerrards Cross nor at Maidenhead. Please contact us by phone or with the form to request a quote initially. After receiving the quote, you can bring your hard drive into the Guildford intake laboratory (Guildford Data Recovery) during its operating hours, Monday to Friday, 9am to 5:30pm, no appointment needed. Every other case will travel to us using tracked, insured postage, with the return leg on our account.
The rest of what Gerrards Cross sends us.
Next door to Gerrards Cross, on the same terms
A quote, then one parcel out of Gerrards Cross, and the work becomes ours.
Nothing will be decided until your free assessment is in: leave the device off, and tell us about the issue you are experiencing.